STARTING TO WRITE FAMILY STORIES
I am so excited to share with you my new mania! Well, it's not really new, it's a mania 40 years in the making. I have been interested in finding out about my African American ancestors for over 40 years. But it has only been since October 1, 2016, that I finally decided to write a book about one of my family lines. That is when I started seriously writing about our Williams family. This project would progress using what's called a pedigree approach, starting with stories about me, my immediate family, my mother's family, my maternal grandmother's family, my maternal great grandfather's family, and then to our enslaved Williams ancestors.
The primary character in this story--our hero--would be our slave ancestor, my second great grandfather named Otho Williams, who lived in Western Maryland from about 1834 to about 1889. I knew almost nothing about him, except that he was born in 1834 near the Benevola Post Office in Washington County, Maryland, and that he was married to Alice and had a lot of children. One of their kids was my first great-grandfather, Otho Sherman Williams.
To learn more about the writing process, I joined an online organization called the Genealogist's Writing Room on October 1, 2016. Created by book coach, Anita Henderson, this organization helps African-Americans write their family stories. After listening to Anita's webinar telling us how to getting started by writing what we already know, I created a new word processing document that was in a book format. I was off and running! By the end of the month, I had written about 80 pages, single spaced, containing the things I "did" know about our family members. This included a chapter on my life and that of my brother and sister, a chapter about my mother and another about my father, and so on. After six weeks of eight-hour days reviewing handwritten bills of sale and probate records, I began to find answers to the many questions I had developed to research Otho's life and times in Western Maryland. But as I soon learned, this would be a bumpy ride.
For those of you who are not aware, African-American genealogy research is very difficult--often impossible--to find any records about our family members before the 1870 U.S. Federal Census. That is because at least 80% of all black people in America were slaves at some point prior to 1860, before the Civil War started. As a slave, we were regarded as chattel property, like a hog or a shovel. You don't list a first and last name for your shovel or your hog in legal records, do you? Likewise, slaves usually did not have last names and they were not usually named in records that are now easy to search. Therefore, for most African-Americans it is extremely difficult to find anything about our slave relatives prior to the 1870 Census, which was the first census to enumerate black people by their first and last names. I had been attempting to learn about my slave ancestors for decades. I vowed this time to be successful. I would learning about the lives of both of my second great-grandparents.
This blog will record some of the many ups and downs this roller coaster ride of African-American Genealogy has taken me on since October 2016. It is a way for me to not only share some of the theories that I developed and resources that I tapped, but also to vent the extreme disappointments of this brick wall, as well as the phenomenal highs of finally finding some good stuff. My hope is that this journey will be helpful to some of you who are also trying to do the same with your family histories.
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